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There are few bad options in 2018, but these are the standouts
La Liste Names 1000 Best Restaurants in the World for 2018
La Liste released their third annual rating of the world’s best 100 restaurants. French chef Guy Savoy’s eponymous restaurant in Paris once again nabs top spot.Dominique Crenn: First Three-Star Female Chef in The States
Dominique Crenn is the first ever female chef in the United States to be awarded three Michelin stars for her Atelier Crenn restaurant in San Francisco.Amazon Alexa and Apple Music will soon play nice – CNET
The new skill comes to Amazon Echo smart speakers on Dec. 17 and is slated to roll out to other Alexa-enabled devices soon after.
Fixing Facebook? Zuckerberg falls short of his New Year’s goal – CNET
From a data privacy scandal to leadership concerns, Facebook’s troubles kept growing in 2018.
Best Revenge: This Nerd Was Bullied Throughout High School, But Today He’s An Adult Who Owns Several Funko Pop Figurines
Throughout high school, Brian Hoffman was relentlessly mocked and bullied just for liking comic books and computer games. Ten years later, it turns out that being a geek really pays off in dividends: Eat your hearts out, bullies, because today Brian is an adult who owns several Funko Pop figurines.
Altered microbiome after caesarean section impacts baby’s immune system
Scientists have observed that, during a natural vaginal birth, specific bacteria from the mother’s gut are passed on to the baby and stimulate the baby’s immune responses. This transmission is impacted in children born by caesarean section.
Immune checkpoints could be key to treating autoimmune disease myasthenia gravis
The PD-1 immune checkpoint is essential for self-recognition by the immune system, with disruption of the pathway associated with several autoimmune disorders. However, the involvement of PD-1 and its ligand PD-L1 in muscle-weakening autoimmune disease myasthenia gravis is unclear. Now, researchers have linked increased PD-L1 expression in the muscles of myasthenia gravis patients with disease severity and shown that this could ultimately help control the immune response and modulate disease symptoms.
Searching an artificial bee colony for real-world results
The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is widely applied in many fields, but it suffers from slow convergence, so its solutions perform well in exploration but poorly in exploitation. Researchers proposed a scale-free mechanism to guide the search of the ABC algorithm. They verified that scale-free networks improve the algorithm’s optimization performance and enhance the search ability of other metaheuristic algorithms.